There probably won't be a blobfish cafe

A website claims that three of the fish will be coming to a London restaurant next summer, but it's logistically unlikely.

Thousands of feet under the sea where pressure is much higher, blobfish look like fish, but above water, they take on the blob-like appearance from which they get their name.
(Photo: Zuma Press)

The fish that
was once bestowed the title of "world's ugliest animal" is getting its very own
London cafe — at least according to the Internet.

A mysterious new website claims that next summer East London will be getting the world’s
very first blobfish café, an impressive feat considering the blobfish has
rarely even been photographed alive because it lives so deep in the ocean.

The café will
supposedly house three blobfish named Lorcan, Barry and Lady Swift, which
people can observe as they dine or sip their drinks. The construction of the
animals’ tank is already underway, according to the website.

If that’s true
and the café owners manage to get their hands on the fish, it would likely be the
very first
aquarium to house a living specimen.

Callum Roberts,
a marine biologist at the University of York, recently told
Mashable that he’s
unaware of any aquariums with
blobfish.

"I'm very
skeptical about any of this," he said. "As with any deep sea species
it's quite difficult to get them to survive. It takes a great deal of
specialist skill to keep deep sea creatures in an aquarium... I would question
whether it's all a prank."

Blobfish are
found off the coast of Australia at depths of between 2,000 feet and 4,000 feet
where the pressure is 120 times higher than it is on the surface. This pressure
is what gives blobfish such a dramatically different appearance when they're photographed out of water.

Blobfish don’t
really have skeletons or muscles, so they appear rather saggy — and quite
Ziggy-like
— in appearance up here, but down below, they simply look like fish. In their
natural habitat, they’d look something like this.

Artist's drawing of two blobfish (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

So unless the
blobfish café is displaying dead blobfish, Lorcan, Barry and Lady Swift wouldn’t
look anything like the illustration on the café’s website.

Still, people
seem quite taken with the concept of a blobfish café — the café’s Twitter
account has already amassed nearly 20,000 followers. Meanwhile,
@BlobFishCafe
only follows one account — that of Simon Mignolet, a Belgian athlete who plays
soccer for Liverpool and is not known to possess a particular affinity for rare
deep-sea fish.